I Am Bread Review

This is an incredible game, don’t let the score being below a 7 fool you. We believe it was a hard earned amount of points and nearly full amount as well. Bossa Studios are very talented and while the silliness of some of their games is probably a topic of debate for many, we have no issue with it. We truly think it’s hilarious and inventive that they’ve found so many ways to get creative with such a simplistic concept. Control each corner of a piece of bread and attempt to get it into the toaster without being too dirty to eat, and it’s way harder than it sounds.

First of all, we recommend an Xbox controller and found keyboard controls more than ridiculous. If you don’t have a mechanical keyboard then don’t even bother trying. Some bizarre combination of mouse and keyboard can be accomplished if you’re truly a strange person. Good luck with that camera angle!

You think bread just lives for your amusement though don’t you? How vein indeed… there’s a reason he/she does the things bread does, see an example of how the storytelling proceeds in the game below:

Throughout the journey players will be faced with a ton of obstacles including getting from one counter to another without dragging “yourself” *(by yourself, I mean the piece of bread) through the carpet. Breadmaster Flex can cling on to things but that only adds to the confusion and further complicates the controls, it isn’t really going to save you until you’ve become well adjusted to controlling yourself. There’s also a good amount of ambiguity between what objects in the gameworld would be an enhancement to the final product of toast (such as jam) versus what would actually make it inedible (such as mould that looks like jam).

All of this is achieved by getting very, very creative and fearless with your bread. Climbing walls once you’ve learned to grip and leap around properly, choosing carefully a path you think can be accomplished without ruining the goods, then attacking like those white guys on the American version of Ninja Warrior before G4TV cancelled it and got their network taken completely off the air for not keeping it real with gamers.

Beyond the aforementioned obstacles, and many more as later levels are unlocked, players have to locate how / where they are going to toast the bread and how they are going to arrive at that location without ruining the bread. This isn’t the sort of game that holds your hands with big huge arrows, no no good sir. It’s more fun this way, exploring around. You may want to play this game in short bursts until it starts to sink in though since it takes a pretty long time to make an attempt when first learning how to play and realizing the toaster is in the opposite direction as expected after making the bread half dirty will give a serious sense of defeat to the player. It’s all part of the fun, but I wouldn’t be surprised if half of you rage quit and proceed to file legal movements against Bossa Studios for hurting your feelings.

Story mode itself has 8 levels full of interactive objects and all of the frustrating, clumsy trial and error described above. At the end of each level, not only will you be graded by toast quality (don’t burn it fools), edibility, and time taken to get toasted, but also deliciousness which is where the raspberry jelly comes into play as you may have imagined. Replaying each scene over and over is possible, and quite fun. But if you have OCD of any degree this game is probably going to be listed on your autopsy report for killing you.

Toasting in the Kitchen: Really, this is like the cradle for a baby. You’re born here and everything makes sense to you, but little do you know that you’ll look back on this day and realize you actually knew nothing at all. You’ll yearn for the simplicity that must have ensued during the discovery of life in the kitchen while being unable to remember what occurred to make you truly believe an insane journey as toast would be easy and that you were ready to handle it with ease. (Translation: WHAT???)

There are a number of ways to toast yourself in each level. In the Kitchen, there’s actually a toaster, but this won’t always be the case. It’s good to try the Kitchen many times until you start to get the hang of this game. Learn the basics, figure out how to discover new toasting abilities. I’d rather not spoil them in this Review, but there’s guides out there if you’re really stuck on later levels or just want to know what personal goals you can set for yourself. There’s at least 5 ways to do it, so don’t just think this is a boring level or something, some of them are pretty hilarious and unexpected.

Toasting in the Lounge: On a serious note, the difficulty from Kitchen to Lounge is like 12 to 1,000 by comparison. Hence why the odd language used to describe the Kitchen as basically, you’re a baby if you think that’s hard and certainly not ready for what Bossa has in store for you in the Lounge. Dirty footprints and the fact that there’s, at first, seemingly no way to get around the level without touching the carpet are bewildering at first. Hang in there, get creative as hell, find something that will burn bread (but not too much), make it there without ‘filthing up’ the situation, and you just might make it out alive soldier.

Toasting in the Bedroom: Feed the plants, make used band-aid flavored bread, play a few MS-DOS games, then get crumbs in the bed like the rockstar you know you can be, examine questionable wall mould, and pop a few Diazepam — don’t worry, that’s what Solid Snake used in Metal Gear Solid on PlayStation One to keep a steady aim when facing Sniper Wolf! It’s totally safe, probably!

Toasting in the Bathroom: Spawning in the medicine cabinet is how you know it’s going to suck figuring out how to get out of the Bathroom as a piece of toast. But by now, you should be a somewhat competent breadwinner, and if you haven’t rage quit the game in its entirety yet then the difficulty spike should only rustle your jimmies in a good kind of way. Some interesting things to try and flavor your bread with include toilet paper and toothpaste, but don’t take my word for it – eat that! Discovering what to toast with might be hard unless you go for that obvious option. Seriously though, who keeps grape jelly by the bath tub!? It must be a British thing… 😉

Toasting in the Garden: Amazing acrobatics again, but on another level. It’s theoretically much easier to get dirty in this level, but since it’s always easy to ruin the bread that’s probably going to be hard to quantify. Let’s say roughly 12,823.35% difficult though just to be sure. Particularly less textured than most other levels, the Garden makes up for it by having wind effect the gameplay. A car is littered with bird poop making us once again question the motives of those high flying freedom fighter rebels, a grill is sitting innocently offering to toast you but conveniently located in the worst possible spot, and it’s not even lit (yet). But is that really the best option? You be the judge.

Toasting in the Basement / Laundry Room: U wot m8? Yeah, all those “your mom’s basement” jokes come to life in the most cluttered laundry room I’ve ever seen. Don’t bother trying to make toast here until you’ve mentally prepared yourself with the patience and finesse of a Jedi Master (or Sith Lord). Power tools, trash buckets, random gadgets, and rogue appliances give way to a number of possibilities here. There’s even the boiler to the home heating system in this room… hmmm…

*Each mini-game has their own set of rules and is entirely different from the main event.

Bagel Race Mode: You race bagels rolling around like a wheel and go for the very best completion speed you can pull off.

Final Verdict:

The major challenges this game will face with players is 1) whether or not they’ll be able to get excited about controlling a piece of bread, which many have proven they are, and 2) whether or not this concept will remain exciting long enough for them to experience all of the well crafted content Bossa Studios have placed in the game. There’s a few mini-games providing side content beyond the natural challenge, and replaying over and over for good times against friends seems like something that could be fun if you actually have friends that like playing I Am Bread.

This title could have easily been released on some website somewhere as a work of passion and have less than a hundred downloads and I would not be surprised. It’s nothing short of a miracle that the mainstream public of gamers worldwide have managed to even find out about its existence and thankfully the hours slaved over developing and polishing the game (and believe me, it really is quite polished) will actually be appreciated. That being said, being bread isn’t for everyone. Ask yourself not what can I bread for my country, but what can my country bread for me? Are you up for the toast challenge?

Official Trailer:

Overall Score: 6.3 / 10
Developer / Publisher: Bossa Studios

Review Copy Info: A digital copy of this game were provided to RealGamerNewz for the purpose of this Review.

Editor’s Note: RealGamerNewZ has moved web servers, some older posts can no longer be commented on and have been preserved without their images. Thank you for your understanding in this matter. This article was written by Jon Ireson on 20150503 and was last modified on 20150502 .